In The Great All-American Tradition

This particular tradition was born in 1919 when the first O Henry Awards were instituted. This volume is the seventy-ninth baby in the family, and the last, we are informed, in a generation edited by the father of thirty such volumes, William Abrahams.

Its all been quite an achievement. Abrahams, in his short introduction, describes how in the period from 1967 to 1996, 580 stories were gleaned from 30,000 magazines of varying quality. He says of this collection, with what must be some degree of wishful thinking: This is one of the very best.

This is certainly an interesting bag